Nature and Human Economy

I've spent a good portion of the morning reading a topic on a backpacking forum that I sometimes frequent on trapping. Obviously a topic such as this spurred some debate. There were contradicting statements made by different people, all claiming to have had experience trapping. Much of the arguments focused on whether or not trapping was cruel. That particular topic is not one that I will address here, as I do not know enough about the practice even after reading about it, and more importantly I've never witnessed it. However, an interesting aside was mentioned a few times in the debate. Basically, when public trapping is banned the government gets to go in and trap for "management purposes" anyways. So instead of selling trapping licenses (I know that hunting licenses benefit conservation, and even if the same isn't currently true for trapping it could certainly be set up in the same way) our taxes are used to fund government trapping. One (or a few, I don't remember) forum members mentioned that much of this "predator management" occurs in order to lower livestock mortality. Though I've certainly read about alternatives to minimizing livestock mortality in areas with predators, I don't remember the specifics and would need to research that a bit more in order to talk about it. Essentially, it comes down to the government trapping in order to cater to large scale ranchers. Agribusiness on the large scale, which has obviously been so extremely harmful to the environment and our economy, as well as the livelihoods of small, local farmers and ranchers.

I've been thinking a lot lately about whether or not our economic system is viable. Everyone knocks communism/socialism, saying that it's a good idea in theory but it's proven ineffective in practice. Well, unfortunately here is where some historical knowledge would help me, but from what I understand it was socially ineffective. Rebellions and dictatorships and such resulted from it. Please correct me if I'm mistaken, or comment with specifics if you know them.

Capitalism, however, is socially more effective but it's fairly clear that it's unsustainable in the long term, and on a large scale. Sure, it's taking more time to prove capitalism's ineffectiveness, but the result is even more dangerous. Large scale agribusiness has mostly taken over our food industry. I'm not going to go into a long rant about why it's so bad because I would probably rant for far too long and that's not really the point. In short, monocultures are unstable, genetic diversity is reduced, they are only useful for their single purpose (no habitat value), our soil is being depleted, government subsidies for large scale agriculture are driving small, sustainable farmers out of business, and the low cost of mass-produced food is exacerbating the problem. Not the mention the atrocious effects of fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides. The point is, if large scale agriculture continues we will destroy much of the natural world. Eutrophication and coastal dead zones will develop from runoff (a severe blow to fishing/fisheries), chemicals will accumulate in ecosystems, poisoning organisms from insects to ourselves, our soil will become barren resulting in a need for more fertilizers (compounding the problem), a greater population and lower production efficiency of the land will result in more habitat being lost, and eventually desertification will probably result. Look at the Middle East. That place used to be the Fertile Crescent. It's desert now because of how many large civilizations have abused the land in that region. North America certainly hasn't been utilized for as long as the "Fertile" Crescent, but our population (and the world population in general) is larger than it's ever been and growing. So yes, the destruction of the land that we depend on certainly could happen on a shorter scale. I'm not saying that it will, because as a society we could change our infrastructure and values. But if we keep going on the current track that we're on, then we're going to doom ourselves. And destroy a large chunk of the natural world in the process. A 6th mass extinction indeed.

So that's largely why I've been thinking about how our economic system is inadequate. But I wish I'd taken an econ class, because I really don't understand our economic system that well. I'm aware of its inadequacies, but could capitalism be made to work sustainably? Going back to the forum topic, someone mentioned that agriculture should once again be placed into the free market (then there was a snappy comment about how the demand for food certainly isn't going to go down). Would something like that even help? Obviously local, sustainable farms that do not grow crops in monoculture would greatly help this problem, but would capitalism allow that? Wouldn't we just get big big "Wal-Mart" style farms that were privately owned instead of given government subsidies? Hell, large chain stores are running small businesses out of business. Is this an inherent failure of capitalism? Would some variant of socialism be more sustainable? Were the failures of socialist systems simply due to the fact that the social timing was not right?

Any comments by anyone who has any idea of what they're talking about when it comes to things like this would be more than welcome. I guess a liberal arts education gave me just a taste of certain fields, but not enough to make me feel confident and/or knowledgeable. Or maybe I strive for too great a knowledge of the big picture, and the details of all of its components. Should I be content to focus on the scientific aspects of ecology and conservation? How can I best preserve the natural world and work towards creating a sustainable society using my field? Am I trying to do too much? Taking on for myself the work of what needs to be our entire society? Well that's an obvious question. Of course it needs to be our entire society, or at least a great majority.

I'm going to end with an article that someone posted in the trapping topic.

It talks about how language perpetuates our perception of nature/economy as a society. The article itself is a little extreme (nobody thinks completely like that), but I think the extremity is necessary. As a society, I think that we do use language that justifies or desensitizes our effects on the environment. And in the context of this language, I think that the points are valid. I thought it was an interesting read in any case.